An Act of Love

Every once in a while, you get a phone call about something or other and if you happen to be the curator of a museum sometimes the conversations appear ever so slightly puzzling.  Such as the lady who rang and said ‘would you like my mother’s dome?‘ – I said…

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The Glasgow Fair

I know this is a week late, but last Saturday was the Glasgow Fair Saturday, 16 July, and anyone living in the West of Scotland has seen the astonishing photographs of literally hundreds of thousands of Glaswegian piling onto trains, buses and steamers for the fortnight’s holiday which to all…

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And Blair breathes again

When I was a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, I developed a Design Unit which was intended to introduce students as physically as well as mentally as possible to the existing architectural stock.  This meant that literally taking them out into the countryside and making them examine…

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A pressing matter

Way back in the late 1980s, we had completed the restoration of the buildings, and I received a telephone call from a very pleasant gentleman called David Morton, who informed me that he had sold a newsagent shop in the town of Dalry.  His family had run a newsagents and…

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Me and the Burrell collection

In 1971, I was a young-ish architect working for Sir Frank Mears and Partners, and architecture and town planning practice in Edinburgh.  When the competition to design the new Burrell exhibition gallery was announced, so with a fellow architect I entered the competition to design the new gallery in Pollock…

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